Tag: perpetual war

Lawsuit says Pentagon’s future warfare panel lacks transparency and balance

A lawsuit filed earlier this month by three government watchdog groups argues that the Defense Department assembled its Project Meridian task force to study the future of warfare in violation of federal law.

According to the complaint, the task force fails to meet requirements under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which include a defined structure and purpose, transparency and public input, and balanced membership.

The lawsuit alleges that the Defense Department failed to follow several procedures required under FACA. Among them, the department did not publish a notice in the Federal Register, which would allow the public to review materials and submit comments, or consult the General Services Administration, or GSA, to determine whether the research would serve the public interest.

In a statement, Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, one of the plaintiffs, said FACA “sets clear requirements about transparency and avoiding conflicts of interest.” He argued that the Defense Department must either comply with those requirements or disband the project.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Project Meridian in September, he named Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, both owners of defense companies, and conservative politician Newt Gingrich as its directors. Nineteen others were also appointed to participate, most of whom have financial ties to the defense industry or are political allies of the administration.

According to the complaint, Musk’s SpaceX holds approximately $8 billion in defense contracts, while Luckey’s Anduril Industries holds approximately $25 billion. Other participants include executives from software and AI company Oracle, autonomous shipbuilder Saronic Technologies, manufacturer Hadrian Automation and humanoid robotics company Agility Robotics, as well as investors in other defense companies.

The lawsuit also challenges the qualifications of participants without direct financial interests in the project, arguing that they “do not provide fair balance.” Their experience, according to the complaint, is largely limited to working with companies already represented on the panel or advancing the Trump administration’s political agenda.

Before filing the lawsuit, the plaintiffs say they offered to make their own experts available to the project but received no response.

“Given Project Meridian’s purpose to ‘map the trajectory of future warfare,’ the views of its members do not approach fair balance,” the lawsuit says, adding that the panel “has no meaningful representation from any person or entity with a record of advocating for restraint in the proliferation and use of military assets.”

Sherman argued that federal law prohibits the Defense Department from “getting advice in secret, by defense contractors with enormous potential conflicts of interest.” He said the department is “soliciting private counsel from contractors about military capacity, including the president’s largest political benefactor.”

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The Nuke Question: Wall Street’s Top Defense Analyst Says US Nuclear Use In Iran “Cannot Be 100% Ruled Out”

For eight months, every Iran headline has come with the same two-way trade: peace deal on Monday, “locked and loaded” by Friday.

This week was no exception: Monday, November 9 was the date that a handful of media reports had penciled in for the resumption of major US strikes (a new moon, three carriers on station, the midterms safely in the rearview mirror). Instead, President Trump walked out of a meeting with Qatar’s prime minister and told reporters that military action against Iran does not seem necessary at this point, one day after telling CNN that new bombing is “highly unlikely” if talks progress. Stocks responded with an everything rally, with the S&P closing up 2.4%, while Brent slid back below $95, extending what was already its biggest weekly drop since the Covid crash.

And yet, in the same 72 hours the US carried out what Trump called “minor” strikes on Qeshm Island (which have continued since), the IRGC reported three more tankers ablaze in the Strait of Hormuz (with more tankers catching fire through Friday), a Houthi missile damaged an Aramco tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline was hit in the Medina region, and Secretary of State Rubio said no breakthrough was in sight. Peace, in other words, is going great.

Which brings us to the best single piece of sell-side work we have seen on where this war goes next. In a note published on election day and titled “Lots of Variables in Resumption of Middle East War. The Nuke Question” (available to pro subs), Capital Alpha’s veteran defense analyst Byron Callan does something that very few of his peers have been willing to do: he admits he has no idea whether the US and Israel hit Iran at scale again in November or December, and then explains why the answer may matter less than what the next round would cost. As he puts it:

Maybe the U.S. and Israel strike Iran at scale again in Nov.-Dec. 2026, and maybe they don’t. Markets seem to have fainting spells every time there is hope of a peace deal, but there is precedent for negotiations being abruptly cut off as strikes commence.

In other words, the market keeps pricing the last headline, while the people with the bombers keep their options open. Regular readers will recall that negotiations were also “progressing” in late February, right up until the morning of February 28.

And then there is the part of the note that gave it its title. Callan very much doubts that Washington would ever use a nuclear weapon on Iran’s deepest bunker, but in his words the possibility “cannot be 100% ruled out.” When the dean of Washington defense research feels the need to put that sentence in writing, well, it is probably worth reading the rest.

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The Status Quo Is a Comic-Book Parody

The sharpest critique of the status quo–and therefore the one most likely to spark spittle-flecked freakouts–is that stripped of self-important spin, it’s a comic-book parody of a functional state of affairs. The key to a solid parody is the most absurd exaggerations are taken with the utmost seriousness, as if the participants are completely unaware of the laughable nature of the caricatures they’re playing.

So let’s conduct a thought experiment: boil off all the grandiose self-importance (“we’re serious people discussing serious things,” blah-blah-blah) and hyper-stylized spin (“AI will make everything free, or end the world as we know it!”), and then try to parody what’s left.

You can’t. Everything in the status quo is already a self-parody and therefore impervious to being parodied. Whatever we come up with as a parody is only a pale shadow of what’s passed off as “serious people doing serious things.”

Consider The Imperial Project ™ War Room for playing their live-action game War of Choice ™. This is the pinnacle of “serious people discussing serious things”–what’s our next War of Choice ™?

It’s not ideal, but it’s the only war we got.

War generates inflation which creates an illusory “growth” that impoverishes the bottom 90% as life becomes unaffordable, a tragicomic parody of prosperity: as long as this parody of prosperity enriches Wall Street, the status quo cheers.

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Democrats rescue War Secretary Hegseth a week after election repudiates war

On Tuesday evening, one week after midterm elections that delivered a massive popular repudiation of the Trump administration and its war against Iran, the Democratic Party saved War Secretary Pete Hegseth from impeachment.

The House voted 211-204 to refer to the Judiciary Committee a resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, killing the measure for the remainder of the lame duck session. Every Democrat who voted opposed the referral, but 11 Democrats did not vote. Had they all cast their ballots, the motion would have failed 215-211, and the House would have been compelled to vote on impeachment itself.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Washington hours before the vote to fly back to San Francisco to receive a “Lifetime Advocate for Veterans Award.” Four others blamed traffic. Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan offered no explanation at all. Nine days earlier, Stevens endorsed Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers for Senate, against the party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, in particular over the latter’s criticism of the Gaza genocide.

All claims that the missing 11 Democrats were the product of unfortunate traffic patterns or important “lifetime” awards are rubbish. Had the vote been for funding Ukraine, the members would have been raised from their death beds if necessary.

This was a political decision made in coordination with the White House and the first major political test since the midterms. Under the banner of “bipartisanship,” the Democrats chose not to inflict a political defeat on the administration over the war in Iran, in the midst of their discussions with the White House on Russia and the military budget.

The Republicans understood what they had been given. Trump hailed the outcome as an “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot” and declared that the impeachment had “miserably FAILED!” Hegseth, for his part, answered the impeachment effort at a press conference earlier in the day by calling it “sabotage” and implying those who backed it were traitors.

The calculation behind the vote was spelled out the following day in a Newsweek analysis headlined “The 11 Missing Democrats Saved Pete Hegseth—and the Party From Itself.” Its author, senior editor Shane Croucher, argued that Democrats “don’t need the chaos of impeachment to scrutinize Hegseth.” What “chaos” means here is anything that might encourage popular opposition to the war or disrupt the bipartisan operations of American imperialism.

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Deploy British and French Armies to Ukraine, Warships to Black Sea, to End Ukraine War Says Former NATO Boss

The only way to end the Ukraine war is for Europe’s largest militaries to immediately deploy their troops there and “push for peace”, the former Secretary General of NATO has said.

U.S. President Donald Trump is “siding with Putin” and European states must use force to bring the Ukraine war to an end and ensure they have a seat at the negotiating table at the end of it, former NATO Secretary General between 2009-2014 Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said in a series of statements. Rasmussen, who was Prime Minister of Denmark before his tenure at the top of the Western security alliance, spoke as trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States took place but where European delegates were kept out of the room, a matter of evident anguish for the defence leader and Ukraine advisor.

Speaking to Euronews earlier this week, Rasmussen said: “Europe is begging for a place at the table, but you cannot beg your way to a seat at the table, you have to make yourself indispensable by bringing assets to the table”. He subsequently added: “Europe will not talk its way to the negotiating table. We must force our way there, with action.”

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Democratic Senator Says ‘Beauty’ Of Ukraine War Is Paying Ukrainians To Kill Russians

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) said on Monday that the “beauty” of the nearly five-year-old Russia-Ukraine war is the fact that the US is “paying Ukrainians to kill Russians.”

Gallego, who joined the Senate last after serving in the House for about 10 years, made the comment on X, where he insisted that Ukraine could win the war if its forces killed enough Russians.

“But Ukraine can win. Thats why I back them. It’s a Russian talking point that Ukraine can’t win, cause Russia big blah,blah. If Ukraine kills enough Russians they will quit,” Gellego, an Iraq war veteran, wrote.

A user replied, telling the Senator to join the Ukrainian foreign legion, to which he replied, “No, that’s the beauty of this; we can pay the Ukrainians to kill the Russians.”

In another post a few days earlier, Gallego called for Elon Musk to testify before Congress about Ukraine’s recent Starlink restrictions. A user asked if he was pushing the Ukraine war for “financial gain,” and Gallego replied, “No just hate the fuckin Russians.”

The idea that the US is benefiting from the Ukraine war since Russians are being killed without US troops dying has been a common argument of supporters of the proxy war over the years, a talking point that shows disregard for the Ukrainian lives being lost.

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham said at the start of the conflict that as long as the US provides “Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.” He later described the war as a “great deal for America” because it was hurting Russia and no US troops have been killed.

Gallego’s comments highlight strong support for the proxy war among Democrats, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently said he may get more support after the Democratic victory in the US midterm elections. Russia-Ukraine peace talks are ongoing in Abu Dhabi, but so far there has been no sign of a breakthrough.

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How the US Brought War to Ukraine

If there is still someone out there who has persisted until now in the idea that Ukrainian history began in 2022, and that wiser members of the U.S. establishment didn’t warn against, and more conniving members strategize for, each U.S. step toward war from the NATO enlargement of the 1990s through the U.S.-backed coup of 2014, the U.S.-backed war that began in 2014, Obama’s military training and base building, Trump’s weapons shipments, Biden’s hostility toward diplomacy, the fantastic horror fables of Russiagate, the reduction of Germany and France to mindless puppets treating the Minsk agreements as a trick, and the U.S. blocking of negotiation or peace just before and just after the Russian invasion — and if such a someone has reached a point of open-mindedness to information, there’s a new book that might really help.

And it sure is badly needed in this moment of Democratic candidates rising on public opposition to wars, even while promising to escalate the war in Ukraine the moment they’re able to.

But the value of this new book to me lies in how it takes the story of the Ukraine War back, not just to the 1990s but to the 1940s. In Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, Stephen Kinzer gives us deeper understanding of roots and motivations, establishing beyond any possible dispute that the U.S. government began a project of using Ukraine to weaken Russia and pursued it across generations, through changes in individual actors, through failure after failure, and through U.S. presidents who themselves may have lacked a decent understanding of the project they were continuing — so that, as open hostility toward the Soviet Union became supposed friendliness toward Russia, the public face of obliviousness regarding Russia’s inscrutable opposition to the unchanging project of bringing Ukraine into NATO may in fact have involved some actual obliviousness.

Kinzer opens his book claiming to be presenting just the facts, ma’am, and to in no sense be denying the role that Ukrainians have played in their own history. He takes no position on Russia’s criminal and murderous actions, but simply includes them as part of the story. Nonetheless, it is a story of a major project aimed at influencing Ukraine and Russia from Washington, Langley, and Manhattan — sometimes secretly, for example by parachuting would-be revolutionaries into Ukraine to meet their deaths, and sometimes openly, for example celebrating U.S. efforts to interfere in a Russian election to ensure that a drunken buffoon remain in charge of Russia. Even the interference in Ukraine during the eight years leading up to 2022 was generally a point of pride to be openly bragged about right up until it wasn’t. Not just U.S. officials like Victoria Nuland but private foundations such as George Soros’ couldn’t help crowing about how much they’d spent and how responsible they were for overthrowing and manipulating the government of Ukraine. Even now, Nuland goes on camera and openly admits to the U.S. blocking of a peace agreement just weeks after the Russian invasion, and NATO’s top officials can’t stop themselves from pointing out that the insistence on NATO membership was the cause of the war. But the rest of us aren’t supposed to repeat these things.

In Ukraine we have polls now showing large majority support for compromising and ending the war, whereas for a couple of years we we badgered with our supposed responsibility to risk nuclear apocalypse because Ukrainians wanted it. The story of U.S. government behavior from the 1940s on, during which the desires of Ukrainians mattered to U.S. policy makers exactly never, makes clear what an odd and fleeting pretense it was to claim that keeping Ukraine at war was a sacred duty to the people of Ukraine who were insisting upon it.

When World War II ended and the U.S. government was able to jump right back to treating the Soviet Union as its primary enemy, some in the incipient U.S. spy-sabotage-assassination complex that would become the CIA saw Ukraine as the most powerful tool available to threaten Russia, just as Russia saw Ukraine as the pathway for a threatening invasion. Frank Wisner was an early driving force. He would witness a murderous Soviet takeover in Romania. Other key individuals over the decades would themselves or their families have histories of resentment toward Russia. Stalin had starved millions. Soviets had abused and humiliated on a large scale. People like Frank Wisner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, “Masha” Yovanovitch, Evelyn Farkas, Alexander Vindman, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and many more seem to have taken their Russophobia very personally, while others like Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden had more general policies of preferring brute force to words.

The U.S. erased the Nazi history of hundreds of Ukrainians in order to illegally bring them — including the usual quota of Soviet spies — to the United States. Hundreds more were put to work in Germany. Mass murderers of Jews and Poles were protected from both Nuremberg and Soviet justice in order to engage in the Cold War game of spying and counter-spying, propagandizing, infiltrating, and fantasizing about overthrows. For years, Ukrainians were sacrificed to the dream by being sent into Ukraine to the waiting arms of the well-informed Soviets. Fighting for Ukraine to the last Ukrainian is not a new idea.

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Leaks Reveal Over 11K Foreign Fighters Killed In Ukraine

It has long been an open secret that foreign fighters are active in Ukraine, on both sides of the conflict.

Early in the war, which is now approaching the 5-year mark, foreign and Western volunteers and mercenaries poured into Ukraine in support of its armed forces.

But then as the grinding war of attrition went on for years, there began to be more and more ackowledgement that the Kremlin too was relying on foreign units.

This included, by some estimates, at least 10,000 Noth Korean troops assisting Russia’s military. There was also a recruitment drive among African nations, which saw impoverished men travel to Russia – hastily sign military contracts – and then quickly find themselves on the front lines in the Donbass region.

Leaked data from Russian state systems reveals that over 11,000 foreign nationals fighting for Russia have been killed in the four-and-a-half years since the Ukraine war started.

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Zelensky Wants Western Taxpayers to Finance His Army for Another Decade

The war has not even ended, and Zelensky is already demanding that Western taxpayers finance an 800,000-man Ukrainian army for another TEN YEARS! After billions upon billions have been poured into Ukraine, destroying the finances of European governments while their own citizens struggle with rising taxes and declining living standards, Kyiv is now discussing how to make this arrangement last another decade. This is absolutely astonishing. We have governments borrowing money they do not have to finance a war they have been unable to bring to an end, and now they are being asked to maintain one of the largest standing armies in the world long after the fighting stops.

According to a senior Ukrainian official cited by AFP, Kyiv presented the proposal during negotiations with Russia and the United States in Abu Dhabi. Zelensky had already declared in October that he wanted to maintain 800,000 troops if Western governments provided the funding. He has also insisted that the size of Ukraine’s military is not negotiable with Moscow. Ukraine argues that this enormous force is necessary to deter another Russian invasion. Ukraine cannot simply dictate the size of its military and then expect foreign taxpayers to provide a blank check to maintain it. National defense is one of the most expensive responsibilities of any sovereign government. If Kyiv intends to preserve a wartime military establishment indefinitely, it must explain how that obligation can be supported by an economy that has been devastated by years of conflict.

Ukraine already maintains an estimated 880,000 to 900,000 active military personnel, compared with approximately 200,000 before the Russian invasion in 2022. Zelensky is proposing to retain almost the entire wartime force. Germany has roughly 180,000 active personnel, Britain around 147,000, France approximately 200,000, and Poland around 200,000. Ukraine’s proposed army would exceed the active forces of Germany, Britain, and France combined. Pakistan maintains approximately 660,000 active personnel, while South Korea has around 450,000. Only a handful of countries maintain larger forces, including China, India, Russia, and the United States. Those countries finance their militaries primarily through their own national budgets. Zelensky wants Ukraine to maintain a military comparable to the world’s largest powers while sending the bill to foreign governments. The sheer audacity of this proposal should be enough to force a serious debate over what the West is actually committing itself to.

Let us put some numbers on the table because politicians seem to believe money grows on trees. At an illustrative annual cost of $30,000 per soldier, including pay, benefits, equipment, training, and support, an army of 800,000 would require $24 billion every year. That is $240 billion over ten years. At $50,000 per soldier, the figure rises to $40 billion annually, or $400 billion over the decade. These are illustrative calculations rather than official budget estimates. They also exclude major weapons purchases, reconstruction of military infrastructure, and replacement of equipment destroyed during the war. We haven’t even factored in benefits, retirement, disability payments, or the endless other costs associated with merely the soldiers themselves.

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Saudi Arabia Turns to Syria for Troops as Iran-Backed Houthis Fire Missiles and Drones at Riyadh

The Iran-backed Houthis said they fired missiles and drones at Riyadh on November 8 as Saudi Arabia sought troops from Syria’s new government. Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry said falling shrapnel from an “attempted attack” caused minor damage to a Saudi Aramco administrative building in the King Abdullah Financial District. No casualties were reported.

The Houthis said they carried out “four qualitative military operations” that included ballistic and cruise missile launches. Coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki said Saudi air defenses destroyed two ballistic missiles fired at Riyadh and that coalition forces destroyed two launchers in Saada that were used in the attack.

The day before, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed six operations targeting Aramco facilities, Riyadh’s airport, and Saudi troops on both sides of the Saudi-Yemeni border. He said the Houthis were imposing “blockade for blockade” and “escalation for escalation.”

The Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, and a Saudi-led coalition entered the war in 2015 to support Yemen’s government. A truce began in 2022. Fighting resumed in July 2026 after the Houthis allowed an Iranian plane to land in Sanaa, defying Saudi control of Yemen’s airspace.

The Houthis then declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia and began striking Saudi ships, territory, and oil facilities. In September, they seized territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The Saudi front is part of the wider regional war that began in February when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The United Nations says more than 1,600 people have been killed and more than 300,000 displaced since fighting resumed in July.

The State Department ordered non-emergency U.S. government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, effective October 23. A November 3 U.S. Embassy alert cited Houthi attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure that caused civilian casualties. U.S. government employees are barred from traveling within 20 miles of the Yemen border.

In early October, a U.S. official told Reuters that Saudi Arabia had asked Syria to deploy forces against the Houthis. The request reportedly came up during Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s Riyadh meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A Syrian diplomat said at the time that Syria “stands with Saudi Arabia in the face of Houthi attacks.”

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